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2 Thoughts to “Thanksgiving Unstuffed”

— A fellow I know lives on the outskirts of Haymarket. He woke up on Thanksgiving morning and found about 16 wild turkeys strutting around his back yard. You still have a Rural Crescent worth protecting.

— Even back in the 1960’s, the days just before the electronic and satellite age, the U.S. Navy still employed some of the basic navigation techniques which were in use on the Mayflower. We shot the heavenly bodies twice a day with a sextant and then had to wrestle with some complex calculations using those shots plus current and other tables to fix our position and verify our course. Once, when we got caught in a major typhoon and all our electronic equipment and then even the compass went down, we were unable to see those heavenly bodies and consequently had no idea whatsoever where we were in the Pacific and no idea what was in front of us. That’s sort of like driving down the interstate wearing a blindfold. When the storm lifted and we were finally able to use the sextants, we found we were 400 miles off course in the deepest part of any ocean anywhere in the world. We also found that, after several days of pounding by waves higher than our superstructure, the steel top deck had developed a crack all the way across. But that sturdy old ship took us all home safely. Talk about “thanksgiving”!!! That ship had been built by our own fathers and grandfathers, so to speak, during World War II. Truly “The Greatest Generation.”